Chip Bok's Bokbluster

I got the idea for this from a Bloomberg article about a deposition by Hillary aide Huma Abedin.

Huma testified to Judicial Watch lawyers that she advised Hillary to get on the State Department email server. The reason being some of her important messages were ending up in spam files.

Hillary rejected that advice because she didn’t want to “risk the personal being accessible.”

Abedin testified that “the personal” referred to non-government messages Clinton was also exchanging via the e-mail address rather than any improper treatment of government records.

Now It’s Personal

Kimberly Strassel reported in the WSJ that Hillary’s personal emails weren’t all about Chelsea’s wedding plans, her mother’s funeral, or yoga. Some were about a Chicago Securities trader named Rajiv K. Fernando. He landed on the International Security Advisory Board. The board has “the ability to access the nation’s most sensitive intelligence.” Nobody knew how Fernando got there:

Mr. Fernando had no background that would have qualified him to sit on the ISAB alongside the likes of former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, former Defense Secretary William Perry, a United Nations chief weapons inspector, members of Congress, and nuclear scientists. That Mr. Fernando didn’t belong was apparent. “We had no idea who he was,” one board member told ABC News. So how exactly did he get there?

We now finally know, thanks to State Department internal emails that the government was forced to turn over to the watchdog group Citizens United. And thanks to ABC News, which began digging into Mr. Fernando’s bizarre appointment when it first happened.

In August 2011, ABC requested a copy of Mr. Fernando’s resume from the State Department. This, the internal emails show, sent a press aide reeling to find answers to how a trader had ended up on the ISAB. Even the aide noted that it was “natural to ask how he got onto the board when compared to the rest of the esteemed list of members.”

The response came only a few hours later in an email from Wade Boese, chief of staff for an undersecretary of state: “The true answer is simply that S staff ( Cheryl Mills) added him,” Mr. Boese wrote. “Raj was not on the list sent to S; he was added at their insistence.”